Mainstream Pop Sounds from Britney Spears and other US stars are more exotic to Norient than Pakistani Rap or Swiss Noise Music. However, when these mainstream sounds get manipulated with cheap or free audio software and audio apps, cut-up (and shredded) in bits and pieces, pimped with ready-made audio effects, we get exited – at least at times. «Is this the Worst Thing Ever to Happen to Dance Music?», asks Clive Martin about the leading label PC Music – or is this music «dramatizing the decline of good taste at the hands of modernity», as Adam Harper argues. Judge for yourself. Surf through our incomplete audio and video selection (and suggest other tracks). Read also how writers reflect on this «New Digital Pop Music », «Bubblegum Bass», «CDM» or whatever these musics are being called.

Selected Audio Playlist

«Musical invention comes from places that don't have excessive quality control, from accident and necessity rather than pre-conceived ideas of superior technique.»

«PC Music [the label] proposes a set of critical questions about pop culture, accelerationism, hyperrealism, digital communities, gender, identity, and consumerism. The questions may not have definitive answers, but that’s partly what’s so fascinating about the collective. It’s not didactic; to the contrary, it revels in ambiguities that even its artists may not fully understand.»
Philip Sherburne, Pitchfork

«Just like the classic punks, PC Music can be heard as dramatizing the decline of good taste at the hands of modernity, and in 2014 that means noble underground traditions like all that monochrome club/post-club music that rakes reverentially and melancholically through 30 years of analogue production all being displaced by digital decadence, rampant excess and fucking children. PC Music are trolling old ravers, the generation that built the hardcore continuum; they’re trolling old punks and their insistence on realism. They’re saying, “We might as well sound like this. In a world of gloss and accelerated desire, this is what society made us.” And in this regard, they’re punks.»
Adam Harper, Resident Advisor

«Bubblegum bass’ sparkly imagery combined with its commentary on capitalism is clearly representative of similar tropes spotted all throughout the filthy depths of online platforms such as Bandcamp, Soundcloud, and Tumblr.»
Ash Beks, The Essential

«Harle [from PC Music] explains that he grew up playing the cello (…) Later, he joined the junior jazz group at the Royal Academy, where he fetishised “really technical jazz”. Free jazz acted as a springboard onto contemporary classical, which he “reverse-engineered” into the world of medieval and baroque music. Later, he’d study classical music for bass guitar at Goldsmiths University – he was the first classical bassist that the university had seen.»
Selim Bulut, Dummy

«Aesthetic aims should be secondary to conceptual aims, otherwise you end up with music that is driven by stylistic references rather than its conceptual or musical ideas, or actual content – I’m speaking from experience here. The music or image – the same applies to both – should be built outwardly from the conceptual core to aesthetic appearance in order for the conceptual roots to be present and visible in the final product.»
SOPHIE, Interview in Pitchfork.

«The aesthetic and cognitive values of bubblegum bass are perhaps reminiscent of Andy Warhol and the pop art movement of the 1960s: re-appropriation, celebration/indignation of mass media and the dichotomy of consumerist/capitalist values share equal footing and it remains the burgeoning task of the audience and critic to decipher the art as they see fit.»
Ash Beks, The Essential

«QT’s claims that she is not a pop star but in fact, an entrepreneur utilising pop music to freely advertise her energy drink.»
Ash Beks, The Essential

«Artists are going with the flow, especially those who have no nostalgia for the older ways.»
Adam Harper, Resident Advisor

Dr. Thomas Burkhalter is an ethnomusicologist, music journalist, and cultural producer from Switzerland. The founder and director of Norient, he published the book Local Music Scenes and Globalization: Transnational Platforms in Beirut (Routledge) and co-edited The Arab Avant-Garde: Music, Politics, Modernity (Wesleyan University Press), Seismographic Sounds – Visions of a New World (Norient) and Out of the Absurdity of Life – Globale Musik (Norient/Traversion). He works as a researcher and project leader at the University of Basel and the University of Arts Bern (HKB), financed by the Swiss National Foundation (SNF). As the director of the Norient Musikfilm Festival, a documentary filmmaker and audio-visual performer, he places emphasis on transdisciplinary approaches between theory and practice.